WILLIAM D. FOOTE : Building a Better Life for All : New Breed of Developer Seeks Housing, Nature Balance

Although not new concerns by any means, environmental protection and preservation are fast becoming major issues facing residential developers throughout the country.

In Orange County, where most of the developable land is in environmentally sensitive areas, the impact of development is magnified. And developers are not ignoring the impact that environmental concerns will have on their businesses.

For some, the answer is to hunker down and fight it out with what some in the industry scathingly refer to as “the tree huggers.”

Others have taken a wait-and-see attitude, recognizing that there are a number of tough environmental laws to cope with but hoping their projects won’t be affected.

And a few, not content to react and aware of growing public and political support for environmental protection measures, have decided to take the lead in dealing with such issues.

One of those developers is William D. Foote, president and co-owner of Southwest Diversified of Irvine, a partnership of Foote and Coscan Development Co. of Toronto.

Foote, a 33-year veteran of the development industry--as a lender, marketing specialist and builder--underwent his baptism-by-fire in the early 1980s with a project on San Bruno Mountain in San Mateo County, near San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

The development was blocked for several years as his company, environmentalists and politicians debated the fate of two rare species of butterfly whose habitat includes the mountain that Southwest Diversified wanted to develop.

The result, proposed by Southwest and adopted by a coalition of local, state and federal planning and wildlife agencies and environmental groups in 1983, was the nation’s first habitat conservation plan.

That plan since has become a model for similar plans, including those established to protect the fringe-toed lizard’s habitat in the Coachella Valley and the breeding and feeding grounds of the Stephens kangaroo rat in Riverside County.

In a recent interview with Times staff writer John O’Dell, Foote discussed the role of the developer in the environmental protection movement. He described the San Bruno Mountain conservation process as “a real learning experience,” and said that while it didn’t turn him into a believer in preservation for preservation’s sake, it did open his eyes to the need for developers to take a lead role in environmental matters.

Foote describes his company as “an urban infill developer” specializing in new projects in urban areas previously used for nonresidential uses. One such project is atop Signal Hill, near Long Beach.

“Infill development, like our Signal Hill project, is a solution to both traffic and air-quality problems,” Foote said. “We are taking heretofore undeveloped land that has been blighted by oil operations and putting housing there, and that is going to cut people’s commute times and . . . help cut air pollution.”

Q. Environmental issues are going to be on the agenda a lot more frequently in the coming decade. Is the development industry going to face increasingly bitter battles with environmentalists, or is there some way to avoid such struggles?

A. I’m not great at predicting the future. But I hope that eventually we will find a middle ground where we can identify those things that are most important to all of us, and spend our money there. People need to realize that young couples trying to buy a home are an endangered species too, and that people’s jobs are important. The preservation of the spotted owl’s habitats in Oregon, for instance, is going to wipe out a lot of lumber industry jobs. But I have to ask if the owl is more important than those people, their livelihoods and the economy in Oregon. What we need to do is strike a balance so that we protect the important things while realizing that we can’t have everything. We have to make some tough choices.

Q. Your company has made some of those choices, hasn’t it? You developed the first habitat conservation plan in the country. But the plan wasn’t an entirely magnanimous gesture on your part. It came after your development plans were challenged because of a threat to the environment on San Bruno Mountain, didn’t it?

A. It was the result of negotiation between the county, three cities, the state Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife departments and several environmental groups and ourselves and two other developers. Southwest proposed it to resolve a controversy, and we all got together and signed it.

Q. What does the plan do?

A. Basically, we agreed to control a weed that was taking over the plants that fed and sheltered the butterflies. We also agreed to give two-thirds of the property to the butterflies, some at the bottom of the mountain where they live, and some at the top where they breed, plus clear flyways between the two so they don’t have to fly over homes to get from the bottom to the top. We assessed each homeowner so much per month--it works out to about $4--for perpetual funding to maintain the habitat and eliminate the weed. It was more than preservation; it was an enhancement to the environment. Left alone, nature was going to eliminate the butterfly habitat with no development at all.

Q. And this habitat conservation plan is now being used as a model settlement for other environmental issues?

A. Yes, it is. Both the funding mechanism and the whole idea that you can have a plan that enables man and species to live together.

Q. Environmental concerns aren’t new, but when did they start becoming a regular feature of development planning?

A. They started showing up regularly about 15 years ago.

Q. And the reason?

A. People got tired of polluted water and air, traffic jams and having important species die off.

Q. Many people point their fingers directly at the development industry as the cause of such problems. How do you balance the role of the developer, and people’s desire for homes, with the need to preserve?

A. I think we’re all environmentalists of one sort or another. It is just a matter of what’s important to you. If somebody lives in a beautiful pine forest, maybe the most important thing to them is to protect that forest. They might use any means they can to protect it, including claiming that development will destroy some endangered species that may or may not really be endangered. But for somebody who lives in the city, the biggest environmental concern may be traffic. So it seems to me that what we have to do is to prioritize. We can’t do all of the environmental projects that we want to do.

Q. ‘We’ as in Southwest Diversified or as in ‘We, the people’?

A. As in humankind, in the broadest senses. It seems to me that what has happened is that well-meaning lawmakers have created laws to protect the environment, and we all back them on that. But now some people are using those laws to thwart things that they don’t want to happen, whether there really is an environmental issue or not. In everyday life, everybody has to prioritize. And when dealing with environmental issues we have to sit down and ask ourselves what are the most important things. Is some insect important? Is it really going to change the way that we live, or should we concentrate on the major toxic pollution that’s in our rivers, the ozone layer, air quality or the rain forests? As long as people don’t have to pay for it directly, they are always going to make the choice to preserve everything. But if you put a price tag on it and say, ‘OK, we can do these; which are the most important?’ then people can opt for the things that are most important.

Q. But if we allow one endangered species to be wiped out because it isn’t essential to human life, or one pristine hillside to be graded because there are more hills, then where do we draw the line? Is there a middle ground, where a developer can realize value from a property and the endangered lizard that lives on it isn’t wiped out?

A. Yes. But I don’t think we are on the middle ground now. In the old days, there were a lot of abuses, and we were destroying some important species and habitats. You can still see it going on in Third World countries. And in Russia and the People’s Republic of China, the air quality is terrible and the water is polluted. So at one time the pendulum had swung and it was far over there--into destruction. Today, in this country, it has swung the other way. The proper place is somewhere in between. We are doing preservation things today that, in the grand scheme of things, are causing more problems than they are solving.

Q. An example, please?

A. Yes. Our San Bruno Mountain project in San Mateo County. We were sitting there, just 13 minutes from the city of San Francisco, and the nearest available large new housing development is probably an hour to an hour and 15 minutes north, south or east of the city. You can’t go west or you are in the ocean. San Mateo had a crying need for housing, and the county and all of the different regional boards expressed that need. All of the labor unions needed the employment. The alternative to our project, if you had to work in the city, was that you had to drive 60 to 75 minutes to get to work. So by delaying us for 12 years, it has meant that there have been that many more cars on the freeways making much longer commuting trips and putting that much more smog in the air. So if you balance saving a butterfly against pouring all that smog into the air because of the extra commute, against the wasting of our precious fossil fuel, the polluting of the atmosphere, the clogging of the freeways and not meeting the need for housing, then maybe it wasn’t a good trade-off.

Q. Does it make any sense to look at broad regional planning as a way of addressing environmental issues?

A. There certainly are things that lend themselves to regional planning. One is air pollution and one is traffic, because you can’t contain those things within a particular jurisdiction. But the problem with these regional planning boards is that often they are governed by non-elected officials who really don’t have economics in mind. We would rather see them elected directly than appointed.

Q. In Orange County and surrounding areas--the Southern California basin--what are the major environmental issues that you see coming up?

A. Traffic, air pollution and housing needs. Especially in Orange County, those are the issues that concern the public. And if they concern the public, then they are the issues we must deal with. I wrap housing into the environmental arena as one of the huge problems that faces us in Southern California. We have reached a point where the only people who can buy houses are those who already are in the market and have huge equities they can trade on. Nobody else can meet the income requirements for a loan. Practically every community has taken an elitist attitude. They say that anything to be built from now on has to be low-density, high-value, estate-like single-family homes. Everyone is pushing for elitist-type housing in their community to try and raise their property values and make sure there are no kids from ‘objectionable’ families coming into their schools. But the problem is that the young people today who don’t have massive equities in homes, and who don’t make those big incomes, can’t buy those houses. And it is getting worse and worse. Every year another portion of the population is getting squeezed out of the market.

Q. What does this mean locally?

A. Well, we can’t just have rich people over 50 living in Orange County. We have to have a mix. Just economically, you can’t have all the executives living in Orange County and all the workers living in Riverside. You have to have a balanced community, with your clerical staff and other support people living close to where they work. And to do that, they have to have housing.

Q. So how do you as a developer handle that? How do we counterbalance the need to have parks and natural hillsides and open spaces with the need for homes that people who make $25,000 or even $50,000 a year can afford to buy?

A. Maybe there is a way of telling communities that for every 3,000-square-foot house they have, they’ve got to have a certain number of 1,000-square-foot homes or condominiums. These don’t have to be subsidized or segregated to be lower cost; they just have to be smaller footage with greater densities. The developer doesn’t need subsidies as long as he can get higher density and doesn’t have a lot of requirements pushed on him. Then each municipality can meet its housing needs. People forget that there is another endangered species out there that is not protected, and that is man. There are a lot of people who are concerned about whether their children will be able to buy a home. And the developer has to add the cost of environmental mitigation to the cost of the house, or he goes out of business and there’s no housing where it is critically needed. But what he is forced to add on because of environmental constraints helps make the housing unaffordable and pushes sprawl further out into the hinterlands. So by virtue of trying to save things, planners are doing the opposite. By restricting and restricting and restricting, they just create urban sprawl that eats up agricultural land. And there are people who say you shouldn’t be doing that .

Q. You are saying that we need to change our thinking about environmental issues. But how is that done?

A. We have to have a mechanism to identify what the important things are and when there are mitigating reasons for doing something. It may be that while you are eliminating a habitat over here, you are doing something more positive for the environment over there, like cleaning up a polluted lake. We are going to have to start making trade-offs.

Q. What about voluntary, private, joint planning efforts by developers to identify environmental concerns, mitigate them and head off opposition to their developments?

A. As long as it is not mandated. I think you’ll find that some developers already are doing that. In San Diego, we are working with two developers to find a common habitat for the black-tailed gnat catcher, to solve a problem for all three of us. But you can’t make it mandatory because you may have landholders who have no money to fund something like that.

Q. Are you working on the San Diego project in advance of any environmental group challenging your development plans?

A. We are doing it in advance. We think the best way to handle these things is to come in with a solution. I’d rather present a solution than have one foisted on me. The other thing we do before we purchase property is to check with local homeowner groups, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and other conservation groups in the area to see what their environmental concerns are. If we satisfy ourselves that we can meet those concerns, then after we start planning we meet with those groups to get their input. On two of our projects right now, in Altadena and Signal Hill, we are using the Sierra Club to help us build hiking trails on our property.

Q. That would seem to make you a leader in the development industry in dealing with environmental concerns. Is that the case? Or are you saying that most developers, as a matter of course, do what you are doing?

A. I think that because we are urban infill developers we are a little more conscious of environmental issues. And we happen to be active in areas such as San Mateo and Marin counties, Santa Barbara County, Orange and L.A. and San Diego counties, that are more environmentally sensitive than other counties. But certainly, other developers do it. And to survive, all developers are going to have to.